Licensing Advent Calendar – Day 30 – Multiple production environments

We are moving towards the end of the year. On day 30, I will elaborate on the license reporting in case you have multiple production environments in your tenant.

Multiple production environments

In case you have a global roll-out of Dynamics 365 F&O, you might have multiple production instances. A valid reason is to reduce slowness, as latency can impact performance. Latency is the delay from sending a package with data to the moment it is received. Distance and network speed influence the latency. Having Dynamics 365 F&O deployed in a nearby data center is at least reducing the distance the data needs to travel.

In another scenario, there was a requirement for strict data separation between different operations. Although a lot can be secured by legal entities, the global tables might need some attention for security. In Dynamics AX 2012, there was a concept of Partitions, which has been deprecated with Dynamics 365. Full data separation can then be ensured by having multiple environments.

Having multiple environments requires multiple Lifecycle Services (LCS) projects. Each LCS project can have one production environment. With the upcoming move from LCS to the Power Platform Admin Center (PPAC), the environments are all managed from a single view. The environments can then be separated by having separate (admin) users. In my demo tenant, I created 3 production environments within different regions.

The users are set up differently in these environments. US-based users will not be enabled in the other two environments. Some users might need to have access to multiple environments. In this post, I will share a scenario where the security roles are different per production environment.

The user Alfonso has the Accountant role in the USA and Asia environments. This triggers a Finance license.

In the Europe-based production environment, this user has two other roles where he needs a Supply Chain Management and Commerce license.

License reports

Although there are different LCS projects, on the tenant level, all users are summarized for the license requirements. I referred to this already on Day 4 – PPAC User License Consumption. The user now needs three licenses: Finance + SCM + Commerce. When you look at the details for Alfonso, you can see the requirements for all production environments listed.

When you go to a specific Dynamics 365 F&O environment, you will see the role assignments and license requirements for that particular environment only.

There is more…

During the Advent period, each day in December, I will share some thoughts and tips related to the Dynamics 365 user license enforcement. I extended the period for my series of blog posts to the last date of the year. If you have questions about this topic, feel free to contact me via LinkedIn, the comments section below, or the contact form on this blog.

Dynamics 365 Licensing Enforcement Advent Calendar

I do hope you liked this post and will add value for you in your daily work as a professional. If you have related questions or feedback, don’t hesitate to use the Comment feature below.


That’s all for now. Till next time!